The Iraq War movies are starting to resemble the war itself: miscalculated, mishandled, unpopular, and with no end in sight. Brian De Palma’s Redacted has at least aroused some outrage, if only because it turns one of the worst atrocities of the debacle into a glib commentary on the elusive nature of truth and images. At a checkpoint in Samarra, a bored soldier (Iggy Diaz) records his experiences on video in the hope of using the material to get into film school. Meanwhile, a French film crew is shooting him and his unit for a documentary, adding to a growing mélange of cable-news broadcasts, Web sites, and security cameras recording, exploiting, and spewing forth mutually reflective images. Didn’t Francis Coppola already make the same point about media unreality with a single cameo in Apocalypse Now? Despite the pretensions, the truth — soldiers raping a minor and killing her and her family — persists no matter who is holding the camera. 90 minutes | Kendall Square

Heavy casualties In 1989, filmmaker Brian De Palma directed the potent Hollywood feature Casualties of War , taking his audience back in time to a vile true-life incident from Vietnam.

Master of war This article originally appeared in the June 26, 1987 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

The medium is the movie In almost every movie you go to these days you’ll see another screen — a television, a computer, even another movie screen — within the screen you’re watching.

Theater of war Saving Private Ryan reprised the glory days of GI Joes fighting nobly at Normandy, but it certainly didn’t spawn a comeback of World War II combat flicks.

Where are the movies on the war in Iraq? Oscar Wilde might have called 9/11 “the day we dare not speak its name.” He would have been correct, at least, that we dared not speak its name to make a buck — until now.

Cinema of Shadows It’s not likely, but Judd Apatow’s pitch for Knocked Up might have sounded something like this.

Mission implausible Like the adrenaline shot that invigorates one of his characters, television wunderkind J.J. Abrams’s stab at the billion-dollar Tom Cruise spy franchise briefly gets your heart pounding, only to ultimately fail at bringing much-needed life to the latest reworking of Bruce Geller’s TV relic.

Tropic Thunder Despite a few soft spots along the way, Thunder combines the dark absurdity of Stiller’s underrated Cable Guy with the unrestrained dumbness of his Zoolander .

Oliver's army While he refers to himself as a “dramatist” rather than a historian, Stone has positioned himself as Hollywood’s gatekeeper to America’s post-war past. Feel-good movie of the summer: Oliver Stone: from the Hollywood crackpot of JFK to the Republican sellout of World Trade Center. By Peter Keough Off-Center: Oliver Stone's trite take on 9/11. By Peter Keough